It won't be that hard to get me to talk about these things.
When it comes to international finance and investment, it's really not as complicated as you might think. There's a bunch of people sitting around the room, and in the middle of the table is a pile of money, the capital available to that company. The guy who runs the Uruguay operation says “I can get you this kind of return.” The guy who runs the U.S. operation says “I can't give you quite that, but I can promise you more stability. You won't have to worry about politics.” The Canadian guy says “Well, I can get you this return, and....”
So what we have to do is improve the hand, improve the argument, that the Canadian mill champion is making at that table. They have to talk about a bunch of stuff. For instance, can you trust the investment climate? A lot of that is provincial regulation. Will we still have access to the wood? Will we be able to make the necessary changes to make money? Will we know what the climate change regulations are going to be? There are all these uncertainties, and the dollar comes very much into that. Do we have any idea of what the exchange rate would be? Is it going to stay within a range or not?
I just want to congratulate Mr. Flaherty for talking about a reasonable range. I think it sends a very good signal to the marketplace. I think his range is ten cents above where it should be, but I think the acceptance of the concept of a range is a wonderful thing.
So you have all those things, and then you have the plain math: how quickly will we be able to give something back to our shareholders? The math on investment in research is very much affected by the refundability of the SR and ED. If you have a mill that's losing money so you're not going to actually be able to use a tax credit, but you know that if you invented new technology you could keep that mill operating, the refundability changes the math enormously. And then with the accelerated capital depreciation, again it changes the math. So we're not talking hocus-pocus, we're talking simple mathematics--i.e., for someone trying to make a business case, this is a smarter investment than that one.
Will it change the whole thing? I don't think so, but it will change a lot. When the finance department comes back and says we can't afford it, they're just dead wrong. You can't afford not to do it, because then the investment will go out of the country and there will be no tax revenue.